Industry practice with railway mixer-transport cars has shown that the efficiency and the economy of operating such vehicles for transporting liquid metals is substantially affected by the difficult and burdensome methods employed heretofore in installing vessel linings. Approximately 20-25% of the operating time of these cars is used for the removal of old linings and the installation of new ones, typically mostly by inefficient procedures utilizing manual operations. This significant loss of operating time with conventional mixer-transport cars results in a large measure from the difficulty, and in some cases the impossibility, of using mechanized operations and automatic tools and devices for removing the old lining and installing a new one. Moreover, due to this lack of the efficient use of mechanized auxiliary devices, working conditions are extremely uncomfortable and oppressive, especially, for example, during the fracturing of the old refractory lining and subsequent removal of the fragments from the vessel. This, of course, tends to produce an extremely unpleasant atmosphere, which is not conducive to efficient work or easy to tolerate by the personnel replacing, removing, or repairing liners.
Accordingly, it is an objective of the present invention to employ modern, fully mechanized devices for installing, maintaining, and/or removing the lining, and to that end, to make the vessel readily accessible, and furthermore, to make possible the rotation of the vessel, after lifting it off the supporting railroad trucks to bring it into an inclined or vertical position. The identification and satisfaction of these highly desirable objectives represent the bases of the present invention. Indeed, the new and improved mixer described hereinafter is more efficient and more economical to operate than any comparable mixers heretofore known to the art.
For example, German patents DT-OS No. 1,936,770 and DT-OS No. 2,053,030 disclose mixer-transports of the type known to the art. While these patents include some structure found in the present invention, they do not disclose or suggest the principles of the present invention. Indeed, the mixer-transport of the present invention overcomes many of the shortcomings of the earlier patented apparatus.